Bringing Up Father — buf390404

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American in top hat and checked suit, as a stranger asks Mrs. Jiggs for his office address and phone number. When Jiggs asks why the man didn't simply call to confirm, the stranger shrugs; Jiggs collapses with "I give up." George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for over four decades — one of the longest-lived strips in syndication history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, ornate wallpaper patterns, and snappy balloon typography influenced a generation of cartoonists. These newspaper dailies, reprinted in cheap pamphlets from the 1890s onward, directly spawned the comic-book format, making strips like this literal ancestors of the modern sequential-art medium.